Asher Brown Durand Paintings

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Asher Brown Durand Biography

American Hudson River School painter, engraver and printmaker
born 1796 - died 1886

Asher Brown Durand was born on August 21, 1796, in Jefferson Village (now Maplewood), New Jersey, and studied engraving with his father, a watchmaker and silversmith. From 1812 to 1817 Asher Brown Durand was apprenticed to the New Jersey engraver Peter Maverick. In 1817 he formed a partnership with Maverick and opened a branch of the firm in New York. Around 1818 he began informal study and drawing from plaster casts at the American Academy of Fine Art, where his painting came to the attention of the Academy's president, John Trumbull (1756-1843).

In 1820 Trumbull commissioned him to engrave Asher Brown Durand painting The Declaration of Independence (1787-1820, Yale University Art Gallery). He became a leading engraver, and enjoyed considerable success producing bank notes, book illustrations, portraits, and copies after other artists' paintings.

In the summer of 1840 he went with fellow artists John F. Kensett (1816-1872), John Casilear (1811-1893), and Thomas P. Rossiter (1818-1871) to Europe, where Asher Brown Durand studied the paintings of Old Masters, especially Claude Lorrain (1600-1682). After his return to New York in July 1841 Asher Brown Durand paintings were exhibited of European scenery, but he soon resumed summer sketching tours in the Catskills and the Hudson River Valley. In 1845 he was named president of the National Academy, a position Durand would hold until 1861. He increasingly believed that direct study of nature should be the primary inspiration for American artists and began producing meticulously painted paintings that were much admired for their faithful depictions of natural forms and light and atmosphere. Such works also expressed sentiments similar to those in the poetry of his friend William Cullen Bryant, and several of his paintings of the 1850s were directly inspired by Bryant poems.

Following Cole's death in 1848 Asher Brown Durand assumed a leading role in the American landscape school and exerted considerable influence on many younger painters. His Kindred Spirits of 1849 (New York Public Library), painted in memory of Cole, almost immediately became one of the best-known paintings in the country. By the 1850s Asher Brown Durand had perfected the two compositional types that became basic to Hudson River School painting, the vertical forest interior and the landscape panorama.

With the publication of nine "Letters on Landscape Painting" in the New York art journal The Crayon in 1855, Asher Brown Durand codified the tenets and practices of Hudson River School as instructions addressed to an imaginary student. Espousing theories similar to those of the influential British critic John Ruskin (1819-1900), Asher Brown Durand advised American artists to work directly from nature and to give precedence to New World subjects over European ones.
This is an edited version of the artist's biography published, or to be published, in the NGA Systematic Catalogue

* Huntington, Daniel. Asher Brown Durand: A Memorial Address. New York, 1887.
* Lawall, David B. Asher Brown Durand: His Art and Theory in Relation to His Times. New York, 1977.
* Lawall, David B. Asher Brown Durand: A Documentary Catalogue of the Narrative and Landscape Paintings. New York, 1978.
* Kelly, Franklin, with Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Deborah Chotner, and John Davis. American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1996: 135-136.